No, it’s that 1998 is so far before they were born that they blurred it with other “recognizably modern but fundamentally outdated” time periods.

A world where cell phones were not common, only 20% of homes had Internet, social media didn’t exist yet and mass media in general was far more homogeneous is as different from now to a child of today as the 1940s.

Ah, choosing to ignore the territorial annexation that took place during the war or annexations that failed? And China?

To be fair on that one, Puerto Ricans seem torn on what they want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_political_status_for_Puerto_Rico

Up until Trump the US has been reasonable about independence questions since WW2, for the most part. (Highlighting that independence is different than being free from interfering)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_occupations_by_the_Soviet_Union

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_territorial_acquisitions_table

Notable examples would be places like “Tibet”, several Baltic states, and an attempt on Finland. Hell, Russia is currently trying to annex Ukraine.

They specifically said 20th century, and were obviously referring to the post world war period.

After the wars, the US sought soft power, not territory.
Aligning with them was often a more safe move.

Yes, because we’re very clearly following the rules of law here, and a central American nation would never be coerced by the US into engaging in flagrant human rights abuses.

Cool. You wrote an opinion that perfectly matched the opinion of a particular demographic that’s common on the site, and are now very offended that no one knew you were someone less common.
Which also entirely draws the conversation away from you saying it’s good that the government pulled funding from an organization that’s doing something good because government messes everything up.

They’re already a non-profit. Why are you upset that they got money from the government? Wouldn’t the ideal to you be an NGO that got money without being under government control, and was therefore free from business influence as well?

Linux is a great example. It’s backed by a non-profit foundation, under the direction of mostly corporate advocates. That’s what people talk about when they talk about a non-profit being beholden to corporate money.
The shape of Linux has steadily been pushed towards being more and more focused on server and data center operations, since that’s what the people in charge of funding allocation care about, and that’s what they’ll direct their parent organizations to contribute developers to working on.

Your government sucks. I get that. It doesn’t mean I don’t expect more from mine, and it doesn’t mean that I reject the notion that I should have say in the management of the things around me.
The NGO that you envision will do a better job managing the drainage where I live doesn’t answer to me, and I have no recourse if they mess up and flood my house.

I’d like something like the NGO you envision, but with public accountability. This is often called a “government”.

Yeah, the lobbying question is a complicated one.

In an ideal world it would be much closer to how the standards committees work. The issue isn’t people sharing their opinions and desires for how the system should work, it’s when they use inequitable means to bias the decision. My industry, security, has lobbied for official guidelines on security requirements for different situations. Makes it easier to tell hospitals they can’t have nurses sharing login credentials: government says that’s bad, and now your insurance says it’s a liability.

The problem is that lobbying too often comes with stuff like a “we’re always hiring like minded people at our lobbying firm, if you happen to find yourself in the position to do so, give us a call.”.
It’s too easy for people with a lot of money to make their voices more heard.

It’s not that the wealthy and business interests should be barred from sharing opinions with legislators, it’s that “volume” shouldn’t be proportional to money. My voice as a person who lives near a river should be comparable to that of the guy who owns the car wash upstream when it comes to questions of how much we care about runoff going into the river.

So you want it to be run like it is today, but with less money? Do you think they’re going to spread whatever incompetence you see them having via funding?

Usually when people celebrate the removal of government from a public service it’s because they think it should be arranged to turn a profit.

You didn’t list your stance on every issue in your comment so I can only assume that you have the rest of the beliefs that I’ve always seen go with that opinion.

people will always mess stuff up. Government is just the group of people you have a say in.

When the public good gets messed up, I’d rather it be by the people I can vote out than by the people who only answer to shareholders.

I just don’t understand the persistent belief that a profit motive will magically make something more aligned with the public good.

I think you might be overestimating how complex the system is. This isn’t collaborative, and it’s barely even dynamic. It’s essentially bookkeeping around a list of numbers and a zip file of text documents.

https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

The reporting of the issues is already done by other people, they just rely on a central group to keep the numbers from colliding.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-3576

Not a whole lot there.

Significantly more worrying is the nvd.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-31161

There’s additional data attached relating to not just the vulnerability, but exploitation and the system configuration that’s known to be exploitable.

Up until now it was benign, as well as entirely unavoidable, for so much of the infrastructure of the Internet to be closely tied to the US government.

Even corporations understand the value of having a seat at the table. A significant reason for corporate sponsorship of standards groups and such is so that if it comes up, they have a person there who can argue for their interests.
Not even in an interesting or corrupt way.
“Our engineers think it would be better to do it this way, any objections?” And then everyone talks about it.

Leaving means you only get to use what others put together. If your needs don’t fit you just have to cope.

Corporations love getting stuff for free, but if all it takes to solve a technical problem is cash, that’s great too. Cash is a better way to solve a technical problem than time and engineers.

I mean, trains exist, they’re just not the best in the US.
You also seemed to be okay with driving, which startled me but is definitively a viable alternative in almost all cases.

Given some of your other comments, I think I’m gonna take it as a “no” on the “telling the difference between travel at any cost and being more mad at systems and those who control them than individuals” question.

Right, which is a big shift from what you were saying before. Your previous position is what caused pushback, not a dislike for the environment.

In any case, I’m glad you’ve come around.

you’ll agree that in the meantime people need to stop traveling then?

You’ll have to forgive my confusion and understand why I might have thought you had an issue with travel in general. Writing off trains and boats didn’t help either, nor saying that people who wanted to focus on alternatives to air travel were in favor of destroying the environment.

How far is traveling? What means do you find acceptable? And until when do you mean?

Do I need to wait until I have access to a totally renewable train to go to the nice beach that’s a 90 minute drive away? What about the 25 minute drive to the flooded salt quarry that gives everyone a rash due to the stunning population of migratory waterfowl? The 15 minute drive to the park on the river with a vaguely unsettling murk to the water?

But you were arguing people shouldn’t travel at all, citing our ancestors who lived their whole lives within a few kilometers. Now you’re saying people should travel responsibly and live with moderation, which is pretty different from your previous point.

When did I defend the destruction of the environment?

You’re reading a lot of “pro-airplane” sentiment in “we should have more trains” and “I’m more upset with the destruction of American passenger rail than I am with people who want to enjoy our world”.

Do you maybe see the difference between “travel at all costs” and “differently directed anger”?

No, you should sell your phone, computer and car because if you’re that angry about people partaking in luxuries with an environmental impactcand you don’t think “less impactful alternatives” are better than entirely forgoing the luxury, then it’s hypocritical of you to do anything but walk or bike and eschew optional things with environmental impact.

It’s quite specifically that you’ve been saying that other people should do without rather than doing better, so… You first. You have legs. You can bike. Our ancestors got along with less, so you can sell your car. You don’t need a phone. It’s a luxury you can live without, so sell yours and get over it.

Why? Our ancestors never worried about environmental impact, and it’s clear that the only thing that matters is what we used to do.

Our ancestors used to find themselves in an environment that wasn’t good and they’d walk to somewhere that was. Or starve.

Or we could, instead of shitting on people who want to see the world and and enjoy the abilities we’ve developed to do so, shit on the people who made the “not terrible” ways of doing that impossible.